I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (10 page)

(Tell me I wasn't born for this. It bothered me, peripherally, back then, as it's bothered me since: Was I born for it?
Was that all it was? Was rebellion just part of the ... just ...
oh never mind.)

She hung on to that `perhaps' for quite some time. I
remember there was a point (I'd placed the fruit in her palm)
at which both of us knew she was going to capitulate, but
also that she wanted to spin out the posture of resistance a
while longer. Between us we invented foreplay and playing
hard-to-get. `Now the serpent was more subtil than any
beast of the field', says the King James version. You bet your
granny's Horlicks he was, with me inside him. I used everything I had. Temptation's less about wearing someone down
with repetition than it is about finding the right phrase and
dropping it in at the right time.

`You're awfully ...'

`Articulate?'

`Articulate. You're awfully articulate, serpent.'

`You're so kind, my Lady. But if the fruit of that tree has
given subtlety to the tongue of the serpent, a mere reptile,
just think what wisdom your exquisite lips will find within
their grasp.' (That was ghastly, I know, that lips and grasp
thing, but she really did have the most engaging ones - lips
I mean, mouth and coons.)

`That is fl ... fl ...'

`Flattery? Not at all, Queen of Eden. Simply the truth.
Does it surprise you that He forbids you that which would
make you His equal, if not His superior?'

An idiom, I knew, within which we could both enjoy the
self-consciousness of my flattery (she was a quick learner,
Eve, there's no denying it) - and though she laughed there
was no concealing the blush of satisfaction that spread across
her throat and breasts. It was, I must confess, so pleasurable to me to sit and play this game with her (I was the spoilyourself-you-deserve-it barkeep, she the office slave letting
the margaritas one by one rub out the boundary of her
lunch hour until - oh dear - there was the whole working
day sipped and swallowed away) I almost forgot where I was
going with it.

And when, finally, with scarlet cheeks and fiery eyes she
sank those pretty teeth in and the juice cartoonishly spurted
out, I, in an intuitive leap I'm not sure I've ever since surpassed, delivered the coup de grace - and slid my ... What I
mean to say is there was a certain spatial compatibility
between my ... It turned out that her ... Oh listen to me
going all shy, will you? But anyway: there. You know what I
mean, don't you? One should make an effort to avoid
unnecessary vulgarity, I believe. Pure evil needn't entail
having a mouth like an open drain. I am, after all, a man of
wealth and taste. And I do know that there's an understanding growing between us. I ... think we can fill in each
other's blanks?

It was my good fortune or honed instinct that one of the
first things (one of many) the fruit delivered was - you know
it - sensuality. Foremost was the pleasure in having knowingly disobeyed. I saw that the headiness of this rocked her,
eyes half-closed, jugular risen, the colour of smoke; I saw the
first taste of selfhood and that it almost destroyed her, as
might an unschooled vampire's first draught of blood. (But
oh, should the vampire novice survive that first concussive
ingestion, what then? Her thirst awakens and increases tenfold!) Ever after, I thought (having discovered inverted
aversion therapy), ever after will wrongdoing and sensual pleasure
go hand in hand. Lucifer, I said to myself, noting with satisfaction the co-operative hips, the flared nostrils, the raised
eyebrows of carnal transport, Lucifer my son you are an absolute bona fidegenius. Liberation, subversion, power, rebellion, bestiality, pride - you wouldn't think even God could cram
that lot into a Golden Delicious. I could see her, suffused
with all that new fruity knowledge (that she could speak for
herself, that disobedience sensitized the flesh, that there
would never be any going back now, that if the only thing
available to the human being struggling to slip the yoke of
service was wrongdoing then wrongdoing she would
choose, that she was, against all former suspicions, free),
considering through the bruise of concupiscence what she'd
done. In their wake ecstasy and crime had left a faint frown
of perplexity, the mark of her astonishment that she could
feel such things, the face's opening posture for self-interrogation - how could I? - that would never go further, because
she knew how she could. Oh yes, didn't she just. She knew.

You are grateful aren't you, that I shackled sex to knowledge and sensual pleasure? Or would you prefer coitus to
have remained in the same physiological league as, say, noseblowing? And while we're at it, you might as well credit me
for getting art off the ground. With our girl's first bold bite
and precocious peristalsis the universe was transformed into
a representable phenomenon, subject separate from object:
represent all of it and there'd be nothing God knew and you
didn't. Nothing u'ortli knowing, anyway. Since that day in
Eden sex and knowledge have formed the double helix of
your souls' DNA.

`When you come, time stops,' Eve said. `It's a tremendous
relief, isn't it, serpent? Do you suppose that's what divinity
feels like all the time?'

In the green grass she was rose-gold and glowing, fabulously drunk and stone cold sober. I saw her mentally pulling
shame around herself like a sumptuous Russian think. For a
moment she held the fruit away from her lips and glared at it as if it had betrayed her of its own free will. But after a
moment's hesitation she returned it to her mouth and sank
her teeth into it again. The decision had been made the first
time. Just in case there was any doubt, she made it again.

'This is just the beginning,' I said. 'Now if you'd consider
turning your ... What I mean is if you could just grab
your - ah. You're ahead of me, my dear. How very charnm-
ing.'

'I'll tell you something,' she said. 'I'm not sure I ever
really liked him.'

'Adam?' I said. 'I don't blame you.'

'Not Adam,' she said, struggling to swallow a greedily
chomped chunk. 'God'

And so to the present, gentle reader, and the preposterous
sequence of events that brought me here in the first place.
(The specific 'here' of Gunn's cramped crib and dusty PC on
Day Seven, I mean.) It's been some first week, let me tell
you. This not quite knowing what tomorrow will bring
game's not for the fainthearted, is it? I'm half tempted to start
seeing you monkeys in a new light.

Some chronology, Lucifer, for shame. You're tired, yes,
but you'll feel better for having got it down while it's still
fresh.

Well I wouldn't say 'fresh', what with me still stinking of
quality quiet and French fagsmoke - but I'm jumping the
gun. Let's start, as the autobiographer's shadow or doppel-
Qanger voice suggests (does this happen to all writers?), at the
beginning.

The Violet debacle rocked me, I'll admit, and an evening
of furious boozing followed. (I started smoking, too. I'm looking forward to stopping, obviously, since the real pleasure is starting again, but in the meantime I've found my
rhythm at about fifty a day.) Not without the profit of
insight. Force, I decided, was the missing aphrodisiac. Against
her will the crucial ingredient. Made sense: the logical extension of Gunn's post-Penelope delight in having sex with
women who don't really want to have sex with him. He'd be
bug-eyed, no doubt, to see where such predilections point.
But that's me, you see: no nonsense. Call 'em like you see
'em. Besides, what was the alternative? A month on earth -
impotent? Do me a favour.

Therefore, having resolved on the kill-or-cure approach,
yesterday's late afternoon found me strolling down High
Holborn in the promising slipstream of one Tracy Smith,
who though we had yet to be introduced, was destined to
play a part in the urgent matter of my sexual rehabilitation.

A good working class Anglo-Saxon maid, our Tracy, with
a middleweight backside and chicken skin calves, puddinglike breasts wonderbra'd up to the salivating world and
ash-blonde hair scraped into a tortoiseshell barrette, revealing
a nacreous neck and two fiercely pink little ears. One
glimpse of that pork-coloured and Wrigley's-flavoured
mouth and this bad boy was hooked. Tracy Smith. Head
awash with telly and Radio One, the dim echo of school
(make-up, gossip, lads), the Pitmans, the Pimms, the package
hols brochure - what else would Tracy Smith be called?
Actually, she's thinking of changing her name. Not the
Tracy, the Smith. To Fox. Tracy Fox. Page Three Girl, children's television presenter, Blankety Blank guest. She's
looked into it. It's not as difficult as she thought it would be.
Only problem is, she knows her mum and dad will flip. And
since it was their deposit anchored the flat (cabby dad, care
assistant mum) she's got to keep them sweet.

So it's Tracy Smith, for now, for me, as she steps out of the
Holborn building's main entrance into the gun-coloured
evening light and the smoked door swings her handsome rear
reflection into my view. Silver puffer jacket, navy pinstripe
skirt, ivory tights and black, pinchy-looking high heels. That's
my girl. A red double-decker roars past with Kate Moss on its
flank - but you can keep the mannequins, the angle-poise
anaemics and mantis-waifs; give me human Tracy Smith,
Nescafe breath, pink M&S knickers, the lone skidmark like
the scar of a struck match, celebrity dreams, crashing grammar
and hunger, hunger, hunger for money. The bus passes with
the sound of a dinosaur's yawn and I slide into my girl's wake,
surrounded by scurrying Londoners whose faces float before
me like waxy lanterns in the city's gloom.

I've always had a soft spot for London, the patched and
tattered cloak of its history (some of my best work, obviously; I felt the same about old Byzantium), its dog-eared
wisdom and inky humour. You know - you provincial
British humans know - what it's like when you crack under
the weight of lost love or ingested desire and Move to
London: the city's ready for you. You take your precious
miseries there and unpack them - only to find that the city's
already assimilated them, centuries ago, along with grand
Elizabethan passions and mortal Victorian sins. The assimilation's encoded now - in the chemistry lab colours of the
Underground neap, in Trafalgar's punk pigeons, in the thousands of ticking stilettos and caffeine yawns and downed
pints and adulterous snogs. You turn up on a rainy Monday
afternoon proud of all your woeful particulars - and London
humbles you with its wealth of generals. You've seen your
life. London, it turns out, has seen Life.

Paris is snooty, and owns its sins like a liberated mademoiselle owns her velvet diaphragm case and jackhammer Deluxe vibrator; but London, London noses its heaps of sin
like a ropy mongrel among the bins, partly embarrassed,
partly excited, partly disgusted, partly sad ...

But this isn't to the point. (This is supererogatory, Gunn
would say.) The point is I've chosen East End bawn an' bred
Tracy Smith (the romantic in me prefers to think that she
chose me) for the latest consummation of angelic desire on
earth. Violet's signal failure to generate the requisite ... Not
that there isn't ample empirical evidence (ask Eve, Nefertiti,
Helen, Herodias, Lucrezia, Marie-Antoinette, Debbie
Harry ...) of my knocker know-how and twat-talent; it's
just that ... taking a look in the mirror ... I'm not sure
what Gunn's mortal frame can support. When I've ravished
before I've chosen my fleshly hosts carefully - everyone goes
home satisfied - but I haven't been able to avoid noticing
Gunn's deficiencies: not particularly well-endowed, or physically co-ordinated, or gifted with stamina. It came as a
horrid shock to me - for the fiftieth time - when I stubbed
my toe on the edge of the kitchen unit, for the fiftieth time.
I've bitten the inside of my mouth so often there's now a
swelling on one inner cheek the size of a Jaffa orange segment. So I think I can be forgiven a wee bit of, ah,
performance anxiety, if you don't mind, as Tracy and I duck
underground at Holborn for the Central Line to Mile End.

The London Underground depresses God. The Paris
Metro's rescued by bubbles of romance and intellectual flimflam (He can tune in for ten minutes and get something); the
New York subway's a toilet, obviously, but it looks like the
movies, you know, it looks hip, famous, cool; Rome's
Metropolitana - well, Rome's got a special dispensation, not
surprisingly - but London, Christmas Jimmeny the London
Underground gets Him down. The Lloyd-Webber ads; the
cadaverous drivers with their deep-sea eyeballs and miles of unfulfilled dreams; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the puking office
juniors and passed-out temps; the death's-door beggars with
their raw ankles and shat pants; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the
buskers; the evening's fractured make-up and the morning's
frowsty breath; all this and more - but chiefly the surrender
to despair or vacancy the rattling tube demands, chiefly the
tendency of Londons human beings to collapse into a seat or
hang from a rail in a state of bitter capitulation to the sadness
and boredom and loneliness and excruciating glaniourless-
ness of their lives. The only thing He sees on the
Underground that cheers Him up is blind people who have
friendly relationships with their guide dogs. (There are a
handful of blind people I've been working on in an attempt
to radically alter the relationships they have with their dogs.
So far, nada. Be nice if I could get one in before the end of
time.)